0

I have experimented with a technique that involves a web page request which you use to calculate the bit-rate based on bytes divided by the time elapsed. You can average multiple data points of course, but is this as accurate of a bit-rate estimation that can be made?

Do any professional or less hackish techniques exists? (Or is this just one of the magical mysteries of the internet?)

Paul
  • 41
  • 1
  • 4

2 Answers2

1

This really depends what kind of speed information you are interested in. You must be aware of several things:

  1. The speed test may be skewed by caching
  2. CDN servers that catch a request (assuming you are checking for HTTP response speed)
  3. The offchance of the network traffic veering to a congested network
  4. DNS caching

My suggestion is to make requests to a fair amount of unique sites for it to test. [Within an accetable margin of error]

Test lots of them and take the average speed, that is what you can generally expect from a client. The max is an estimated maximum that a client can get. The minimum that a client can guarentee is 0mbs.

monksy
  • 14,156
  • 17
  • 75
  • 124
0

Assuming that you want to do this anagrammatically, perhaps one of the connection speed testing services have an API that you can use?

Speed Test

Jeepstone
  • 2,591
  • 5
  • 22
  • 38
  • I'm more interested in knowing how its done then plugging into a black box. – Paul Dec 02 '09 at 08:13
  • Speedtest.net performs a ping for responsiveness/latency test. It also performs upstream/downstream data transfer and calculate up/download speeds based on time taken. – o.k.w Dec 02 '09 at 08:15